She's alive. She's angry. She's negotiating from captivity. She told the contractors to stand down because saving their liveswas more important than resistance and even as a hostage she's making the tactical calculations that the men with guns should be making.
I can't go alone. Viktor will execute me and then execute her because dead leverage is a message. I can't bring an army. His men have orders, and she dies first. But Viktor doesn't account for one variable. One possibility so extreme that no one in the Greek or Irish or Russian worlds would anticipate it.
His father.
5am. Encrypted line. I dial a number I've held for years and never used. The line of last resort. The connection to Dmitri Reznikov, the man who orchestrated my father's execution when I was seventeen years old. The man whose son now holds my wife.
The line connects on the third ring.
"Nico Konstantinos." The voice is old. Measured. Russian-accented English that sounds like patience weaponized. "Your father's son. I wondered when you'd call."
"Your son has my wife."
"I'm aware."
"He's out of control, Dmitri. His aggression has united every family on the East Coast. Greeks. Irish. Romanos. If this war continues, it bleeds into your operations. Your supply lines. Your political cover. Everything you've spent forty years building loses value because your son can't stop burning."
Silence. Long. The silence of a man who uses quiet the way other men use volume: as a weapon, as a negotiating position, as a reminder that the person who speaks first concedes ground.
"Let me kill your son. And this ends."
The silence extends. Then, "What you ask is considerable."
"Name your price."
I hear him breathing. Calculating. The mathematics of dynasty: what is a son worth against the cost of an unwinnablewar? What is blood worth when the blood keeps spilling itself across other men's territory?
"One of your brothers will marry a woman of my choosing. A Russian woman. From a family that serves my interests."
My blood goes cold. I stand in my empty penthouse at 5am bargaining with my father's killer and the price he names is a brother's freedom.
"Which brother?"
"I haven't decided. But one of them. Non-negotiable."
I close my eyes. I'm about to do the thing Siobhan accused me of. The exact thing. I'm about to decide someone's future without asking. I'm about to take a brother and trade his choice for my wife's life the way her father traded her for an alliance, and I swore I was different and I am not different. I am a man who loves someone more than he loves his own integrity, and the cost of that love is a debt that someone else will pay.
The irony is a blade and I feel every inch of it.
"And Viktor's reinforcements? His Bratva backup?"
"I'll consider withdrawing support." A pause that carries the weight of an empire's deliberation. "You'll have my answer when the time comes."
The line goes dead. No confirmation. No guarantee. Dmitri might withdraw Viktor's soldiers and leave his son exposed in a factory with six men against an alliance that wants him dead. Or he might not. The old man has played longer games than I can imagine, and this might be another move in a strategy I can't see.
I have to walk into that factory not knowing.
6am. Elysium basement. The map table. The blueprints. The same configuration as the harbor raid except the woman I'm trying to save is not beside me checking a Beretta. She's in a chair somewhere in a factory in Springfield and the distance between that chair and this table is the distance between everything I've done wrong and whatever I do next.
Lex. Cormac. Declan. Stavros. The men who geared up for the harbor raid minus Finn, who is recovering in Cambridge with nine fingers and a fury so concentrated Declan had to confiscate his car keys to keep him from driving here.
I lay it out. The factory. Viktor's demand. The Dmitri call, minus the specific price. I say Dmitri may withdraw reinforcements. I say "may."
I don't tell them about the marriage. Not yet. That debt belongs to a conversation I owe a brother face to face, not a briefing room at dawn.
Lex listens without expression. Cormac paces. Declan leans against the wall with his arms crossed and the Sig on his hip and murder in his posture.
"It's a trap," Lex says.